I’m depressed because I got a 50 on my first world history quiz.

This is sad. If I’m depressed because of some silly history score that I can EASILY bring up because it’s only the first grade of the third grading quarter, I’m never going to make it past life.

Well, another part of the reason why I’m depressed is, despite my efforts to stay on top of things, I’m procrastinating on my world history homework, which I need to do not only to earn some more good grades but it’s also good practice for the test coming up on Friday.

But, then again, I have all of Sunday and Monday to do it (Monday’s Martin Luther King Day).

But I still have to start practicing some ballet and catch up on Chinese.

I’m so tired, though. I’ve had an average of about barely seven hours of sleep this entire week. And I really wish that Ms Barreto (My ballet teacher) would move my ballet classes back about an hour because I’m really tired of getting home at ten at night, the time when most of my friends (Asian and white) are already snoring in their beds.

And my mom should be happy! She really shouldn’t be complaining that my PSAT scores weren’t high (I got a 184/240, which is actually eighty-nine percent higher than the nation’s sophomore PSAT scores. Which is pretty sad, if a stressed-out freshman who took this in October can beat nearly ninety percent of all sophmores in this nation. But then again, this test is for high school juniors, so sophomores aren’t really worried about scoring high on the PSAT yet.) enough, when people like Alice made a C on her American Government midterm, and Jason cancelled all of his extracurricular so that he only has piano, when I’m balancing ballet, piano, art, and Chinese all at the same time.

I made all A’s on my midterms (to my great surprise) and all my quarter grades. In total last semester, I made twenty official A’s: Two overall A’s for each of my seven classes, and six A’s for my midterms (I exempted my Creative Writing exam because a) I could, b) I’d have to write a sonnet in class, and c) I didn’t want to come to school that day.).

My extracurricular teachers all say that I’m an exceptional student and talented, I’m beginning to recognize a lot more Chinese symbols than I originally thought I would, and I’m trying out for every single math competition in the Mu Alpha Thetha club I joined (Unlike some people).

So there, mom. See if you can find anyone to compare me to now. Hah.

Oh, who am I kidding? Of course mom is going to find someone else to compare me to. In fact, she’ll probably import someone from China for the sole reason of giving me someone to compete with.

No, no. I think that’s just the 50-in-World-History depression kicking in again.

But in any case, even though I’m improving my math competition scores greatly, my parents still think that it isn’t enough, and now I’m doing an hour of math every week with my art buddy Anna Chang.

And my mom just dug out the Chinese math workbooks we bought oh so long ago during the summer of third grade, and now she’s teaching me even more math.

I don’t know why they’re doing this, though. I’m pretty sure I’ve expressed a clear disinterest in the math subject, even though I’ve won numerous math awards and am passing the Algebra 2 class without doing anything more than the classwork and homework.

But then again, all the Asian teens I know are reinforcing their math skills because their parents are buying them workbooks and making them do extra math everyday, so I shouldn’t be complaining.

Or should I?

After all, if I didn’t have so much stuff going on (Math club, Relay for Life, and the extracurricular) outside of school, I wouldn’t be this exasperated by extra math.

I’m probably going to end up with stomach ulcers and crap like that from stressing out too much.

But really, if I weren’t born Asian in the first place, none of this would be a problem.

I’m expecting to start working on the ORB, our school’s annual literary magazine, soon, because it’s due out at the end of April. Lorne and I went around to various classes, informing all of the students and the teachers about the ORB and encouraging people to submit their writings and art to be published in the magazine.

I wonder why none of the classes we went to were IB classes. It seems like the ORB is prejudice against gifted people, but I guess that in the past, most of the ORB submissions were sent in by IB people, and so they’re trying to get the traditional students to join in as well.

But besides that, and having to write a lot of random stuff under pressure, I’m having a lot of fun with the Creative Writing people. From last semester’s class, there’s Brandy, A.K.A. Music and anime girl, Eric, the science fiction and fantasy addict, Melissa, the dragon-lover (She wrote her entire NaNo story on dragons) and friend of my eigth grade best friend, Shaina (Who went to Wharton High School, so I can’t see her anymore), Lorne, and Chris, the quiet giant who also acts like he’s a violent, emo guy.

And there are a bunch of other students that I’ve never met before, but according to some of the senior Creative Writers, they’ve taken this class before, just in another year.

Yup. We’re quite the normal bunch.

I’m really, really tired.

 

Now I have to either write a hundred-page journal or type in a blog for Creative Writing II.

So, now there’s even more reason for me to update my blog more often.

Oh, yeah, and I switched back into Creative Writing II, even though I wasn’t suppose to have it this semester. I went from average homework load in IB, to HOMEWORK OVERLOAD.

Switching from Entis back to Mr. Mills for World History is tough. In Mr. Entis’s class, we practically do nothing but listen to him talk about “natural things”. In Mr. Mills, we’ve got a heck of a lot of pages to fill up in our World History notebooks. And those pages have to be relevant to World History, so you can’t just scribble some random history filler and call it a day.

And I come back to Creative Writing II, and I found out that I have a narrative poem due on Wednesday, and a “superb story, extraordinary essay, and perfect poem” due at the end of February.

I’m sorry, Mr. Stanton. I love literature and all, but my story, essay, and poem will not be worth anyone’s time. Especially now that I have all this crap homework to do.

Oh well. I’ll try to do well on updating my blog, I guess.

Apurva hacked into my flash drive over the weekend, because I left it in his car. He plugged it into his computer to “check who’s the owner,” but as soon as he saw that a few of my blog entries was on there, as well as my NaNoWriMo novel, he forgot all about what was his purpose for plugging it into his computer. I had put a password on my NaNo, so he went into a frenzy trying to hack into it. He even typed in, “I am a psycho woman” just to see if I was indeed psycho.

Then he called Jason and told him all about his findings. Jason called me to ask how to set a password on Word (Back then I hadn’t realized that my flash drive was gone), and probably how to take it off (I can’t quite remember what he asked for after that). Hah. My password was six random numbers. Have fun guessing that, you two.

But I didn’t encrypt my NaNo outline. Or blog entry (It was my last entry, and I put it on Word because I was going to print it, cut it out, and turn it into a little scroll for fun).

So Apurva attacked at how this one guy in my novel was called Cody, and there was this guy at my school called Cody Wei. I told him my novel Cody was in no way related to Mr. Wei, as I had first started the first draft of my novel in January, a good eight months before I even heard about Wei.

And then I told him that none of my characters are based off of anyone I know. Well, not CONSCIOUSLY, at least. Vatsal pointed out that the main character’s mentor sounded emo, which sounded a lot like Ryan Stanley. I sort of had to agree with that one, as the mentor was a bit emo, and she was a female (Ryan Stanley is technically a male, but the guys think they know better).

Sort of.

In the carpool, they attacked my blog entry. Apurva and Jason found out that they were mentioned in my blog entry (Well, of course. Apurva saved it onto his computer and emailed it to Jason), but Sean wasn’t. Sean didn’t say anything (As per usual), but I guess he was a bit disappointed. Then Apurva found out that Sean hadn’t read my entry yet, and decided to email it to him as well.

Damn you, Apurva.

I’m encrypting everything on my flash drive from now on. Boy, I’m sure thankful that there wasn’t anything too revealing in the entry that they read. Nothing like the “Moi friends” entry, or even all of the bashings and rantings I gave them in my journal entries.

Jason says that he needed more flash drives from different people. He won’t be getting anymore from me. And if he does manage to get his mitts on one, he’ll drive himself crazy trying to figure out the passwords.

 

NaNoWriMo

Oh, geez. What did I get myself into? Why couldn’t I have taken that calm little PowerPoint presentation project instead of going for NANOWRIMO?!

I mean, I have a great plot that I really REALLY want to write about, but still. NaNoWriMo means I have to write almost two thousand words a day, A.K.A. at least TWO HOURS OF WRITING A DAY. We IB students have barely half an hour to spare each day, let alone TWO WHOLE HOURS OR MORE!

Okay, yes, we get fifty minutes of class time each day to work on NaNoWriMo, but when you include the whole settling down in front of the computer and packing up at the end of class time, that only leaves you with forty minutes to write. Then you have to manage to squeeze out about an hour and a half at home to dedicate to writing.

Mr. Stanton says to pass with an A, you only need thirty thousand words, but if I don’t beat NaNoWriMo, it’s going to haunt me until the next year I do NaNoWriMo, which probably won’t happen until after college. So, I have to write fifty thousand words.

Although, I do admit, I was happy that Mr. Stanton and most of the Creative Writing class knew about NaNoWriMo. Not at first, because I was all, “Oh noes! I can’t do fifty thousand words while I’m in IB!” but after I signed a contract (I’m a minor, which means I can’t enter a contract, but oh well. It’s school, and exceptions to rules are a common thing) and said I would commit myself, I felt better. Not as good as I felt after I finally thought of a good plot to write about, but I felt good enough.

As of now, I’ve got the outline of the first four chapters done, so I know what I’m going to write about tomorrow.

WARD VS. WHITE:

Ward, as part of his revenge, has decided to counter back in a way similar to the incident when White toilet papered his classroom. This time, however, he’s taking it to the extreme — remember that mechanical tarantula? Well, he also wants to make a gigantic sticky web for it. And guess where that web’s going to be? Yup, Ms White’s room. It’s going to span all along her walls and maybe even her desk. Not the students’ desks, though — that would be too drastic. He’s got it planned pretty well, and a good portion of the class is backing him up.

I can’t wait to see Ms White’s reaction.

Ward loves to insult White, too, saying she’s the oldest, most scariest person that ever lived. He incorporates biology in his rants, saying that no bacteria or skin mites are living on her because she’s so ugly and scary, and that she was around way before the dinosaurs lived, yet she can’t tell us humans any specific details about prehistoric life because her memory is horrible.

It’s a hilarious thing, watching those two bicker and fight each other constantly. It makes the torturous IB life so much more bearable.

 

Creative Writing

I swear, my Creative Writing class is emo. Or, at least, most of the writers and the teacher is. See, once in awhile we write a anything we want about a certain topic that the teacher assigns. Then we let others read it (We use numbers instead of names, so it’s totally anonymous), they comment, and then we share our comments and critique.

Usually, I’m a very happy writer, because I’m very happy and I think other people need to be very happy about the position they’re in, unless they have some reason to justify the fact that they’re not very happy (eg. divorce, abuse, etc.). So, I usually write about topics that you can be happy about.

That doesn’t mean that I write about cutesy topics like clouds and rainbows, of course. Just normal topics that anyone would be happy about.

Anyway, this Creative Writing class doesn’t express that. It’s trying to turn everyone into emo robots, I swear! So far, our topics were:

1. Poison
2. Storm

And now I’m suppose to write about MURDER.

Now, people are catching onto this. Before Mr. Stanton, my Creative Writing teacher, gives out the topic, they’re like, “Can it be a happy topic now?”

But all he says is, “Well, you can somehow incorporate happiness with it.”

And then he proceeds to tell us that we have to write about murder.

There is nothing happy about DEATH, Mr. Stanton! Jeez!

Now, if you’re wondering how I can make the topics poison and storm all happy-ish:

1. For the poison story, I wrote about a girl mistaking rat poison for ketchup, which isn’t really funny, I know, but that’s the best I could do with this topic.

2. For the storm story, a girl is mad at her friend ditching her during a storm and then later forgets her anger because her friend invited her to a game of Dance Dance Revolution at Steak & Shake. This is, of course, terribly random, but that was the best I could do in the hour I had before piano class on Thursday. The people in the Creative Writing class said my story was more creepy than funny, but oh well. Give me a happy topic and I’ll write better stories, MR. STANTON.

Now I need to find something happy about murder before Monday, because I absolutely refuse to write a depressing, Edgar Allan Poe-like story.